Law professor Michael Geist uses 10th anniversary of Napster to “put to rest” some of the file-sharing myth perpetuated by the entertainment industry.
This month marks the 10th anniversary of Napster, the granddaddy of all file-sharing programs, and many have stopped to reflect on its meaning both then and now.
Hillary Rosen, RIAA CEO at the time, said recently that “all of a sudden, record companies started hearing from music fans in a way they never had before.” She referred to the birth of Napster as the “day the fans took control.”
Some wanted to embrace Napster, Rosen included, but many were unsure of how they’d be fairly compensated and so it was decided that Napster must go. By the time the lawsuit was over and Napster was forced to close its doors in June 2001, 2 years later, file-sharing had become well publicized and other P2P protocols like BitTorrent and KaZaA had already gone online.
The music industry’s been fighting a losing battle against file-sharing ever since, and has oftentimes used bogus arguments in the process.
Noted Canadian law professor Dr. Michael Geist, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottowa, and is a noted academic on the issue of Canadian copyright law, also observed the Napster anniversary by taking the time to “slay Canadian file-sharing myths.”
“The two myths that dominate debate are: all file-sharing is legal in Canada and, perhaps as a consequence of this, that Canada leads the world in illegal file-sharing activity,” he said recently in The Star. “Neither claim is true.”
He says the first myth began with the Canadian music industry’s failure to force ISPs to divulge the personal information of 29 accused file-sharers back in 2004 in the same fashion that had been so successful in the US. The judge says the evidence presented was weak and raised copyright law and privacy issues.
“The reality is Canadian law features a private copying exemption that includes a levy on blank media,” he adds. “The Federal Court and the Copyright Board of Canada have intimated the levy, which has generated hundreds of millions of dollars, could apply to personal, non-commercial downloading of sound recordings onto certain blank media. The law therefore opens the door to some legalized music downloading, but it does not cover other content (movies or software) or the uploading of any content.”
The second myth he debunks is that Canada has the highest per-capita file-sharing population in the world.
He notes that the figure is based on a nearly 6-year-old study that didn’t take into account if measured P2P activity was legal or not, only tallying the total number of connected peers and and assuming it was illegal, and covered a mere 30 countries of the entire world!
“Canada stood first in that study, yet, there is ample reason to doubt its validity today,” Geist observes. “In addition to the fact the OECD made no claims about illegal activity or about file sharing in the more than 150 non-OECD countries, newer studies indicate Canada is declining as a hub of file-sharing activity relative to the rest of the world.”
He points out that anti-piracy firm BayTSP recently issued a report on the state of worldwide P2P use which concluded that Canada dropped from 7th to 10th place in its country by country measurement of total copyright infringement notices sent to alleged file-sharers.
“The decline runs contrary to Canadian file-sharing mythology, but it should not surprise since it mirrors Canada’s decline in the global high-speed Internet access rankings,” he continues. “This suggests Canadians may have been early file-sharing adopters due to better access, but other countries have now passed us.”
“Much has changed since Napster took the world by storm 10 years ago. As we look ahead to the next decade, it is time to ground the debate in fact rather than fiction,” he adds.
Much has changed in the past 10 years, but for the music industry it seems that more things change the more they stay the same.
i read this a few days ago
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/647038
Guess you didnt read the article:
“Law professor Michael Geist uses 10th anniversary of Napster to “put to rest” some of the file-sharing myth perpetuated by the entertainment industry.”
as a matter a fact i did
love reading this stuff ,, we’re a left wing generation